Category: .

Bruce Warila sez:

Unchecked, a song that’s repeatedly covered, shared and played by everyone gets used up; the resource does deplete.

As the song becomes more widely known, it loses some of its initial value. So you could make a case that filesharing damages songs by making them more popular.

Neilsen Business Media: Web Music Category Tunes to Audio, Visual Ad Models

“The behavior of listening to music, at the end of the day, is almost entirely audio driven,” said Eric Ronning, co-president, sales of the Internet Radio firm TargetSpot. But many music playlist sites have been hesitant to push audio ads, instead building their ad business around display advertising and sponsorships. Ronning predicts that may change as these businesses evolve. “You can argue that playlists are highly engaging, but they are also an iPod like. I don’t expect an ad so much in that experience…and almost none of that is visual.” Yet many Web music purveyors see visual ads as better suited for such an interactive medium. For example, when users listen to free CDs on AOL Music, “they may be focused on other things, but there’s lots of natural engagement moments that bring you back to the site,” said Mike Rich, AOL’s senior VP, AOL Entertainment. “For us, context and curation are key to keeping users engaged.” (AOL Music’s audience surged by 24 percent to 28 million uniques this past May, per comScore). That’s true even for a seemingly background-relegated music product like the popular Web radio platform Pandora. Its users actively rate songs 7 million times a day in aggregate. “That’s seven million times people come in contact with your ad,” said chief revenue officer John Trimble. Still, Pandora has introduced audio ads in the past year.

It’s not just that copies of a song aren’t rivalrous. It’s that the more copies there are, the more the song is worth.

That’s because one of the functions of music is to be cultural currency. Michael Jackon’s “Thriller” is a good conversational topic. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a landmark that we’d use to describe similar, but less known, works. Thriller and Beethoven’s Ninth wouldn’t be useful in those ways if they weren’t so well known.

Shared references are the power source for mashups like Girl Talk. Because everybody in the crowd recognizes the source samples, the audience can understand they music. The better known the song is, the more people get the reference. And the more copies, the better known.

To get venture capital you need to be pitching a business which can get very big. To make a music company which does that much volume you need to pursue mainstream listeners. To capture mainstream listeners you need content in the short head.

Ergo, eMusic did a deal for music from Sony’s catalog, like Bob Dylan. To do it they needed to raise prices substantially.

But eMusic’s longtime subscribers were evidentally able to get by without Sony’s catalog, and were customers on the basis of lower prices.

The new prices are about double the old ones. The new catalog is shallower, not deeper, so it doesn’t serve the needs of this user base. Higher prices, lower quality.

You see where I’m going with this. Good luck and god speed to you, eMusic. May the road rise with you and the wind be at your back. See ya wouldn’t wanna be ya. Git along little dogie.

But here’s what I’m wondering: who’s going to serve us niche buyers? Is there really no business here? Because I personally wanted more hopelessly obscure electronica, comedy proto-funk, and barely audible wax cylinders, and I can’t be the only one. So whose customer are we now?

And I don’t mean which baby business is willing to take our money until it grows up. Our money’s green as anybody’s — who want it?

There’s a tension between profitability and scale. With niche customers you can earn more per customer but less overall, because there are fewer customers… So don’t talk to me about long tail music, because it’s really a different kind of business than short head music. It’s not selling more of less. It’s a different kind of product with higher margins but lower volume.

Here’s the (Flemish) web site for the band Flat Earth Society:

It’s nice looking.

If you click around for a page that lets you buy something, here’s what you get:

It looks like a scuzzy back hall that nobody goes to, doesn’t it?

Hit one of those Add To Cart buttons and here’s what you get:

Huh?

It’s like shopping at Prada and finding the checkout counter is in the bathroom. But nothing unusual there — the purchasing experience is often the weakest part of music on the web.

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P.S.: That Pay Pal screenshot is a data URI embedded via data URI kitchen. It’s more convenient to do that than to upload a file to my web server. If it doesn’t work for you, can you leave a comment saying what browser you use? I wouldn’t do this on a commercial site, but this is a blog…

Indie Music Tech has posted a mini-interview about Wax MP3. Thanks to Duncan Freeman of Band Metrics for making it happen.

Michael Jackson was a real musician. He had talent out the ass. Amazing time, tone, phrasing, energy, and style, not to mention pitch, range, projection, and every other musical gift that a pop singer needs or wants.

He personified big budget mega stars. The musical world that he dominated so utterly was disappearing before his eyes. The new one demands warmer and more intimate personas, the opposite of his grandiose narcissism:

He was a joke.

He was a sentimental fraud. Songs like “We Are the World” are terrible rock bottom drech. You cannot suck worse.

At the end he was not as rich as he used to be.

He personified self-loathing.

But he was an untouchable musician. The guy could play.

Jay Fienberg of HereJam: The web page is the new shiny disc

the new release is (going to be) all about how the music appears on / across the web.

The files and discs are almost irrelevant—definitely secondary. They do need to exist, but, really, once they are published, anyone can get them anywhere. But, the player / interface is primary, because it’s actually about that “content” that is the music—about getting into that music.

musician’s new music + record label’s new player = a new release

the player itself is the new format for music. And, rather than it being a single / fixed format, it is instead of the web (e.g., like a website—it is a web page or website). Each player can be distinctive in design, but all players will have at least a few common, idiomatic, elements that make it similar to other players. They marry idioms of the web with idioms of the music player—both provide nearly unlimited opportunities for design—for being turned into products.

You’ll know it’s a music player when you see it (e.g., maybe it has something to click to make it play), but the player format can be totally free to be any kind of web page(s), which can have original and distinctive shapes, structures, semantics, contexts, interactions, looks, feels, etc. The web page is the new shiny disc.

Jonathan Bailey at Plagarism Today: Is Creative Commons Right For You?

I recommend Creative Commons to almost everyone I meet and actively discourage people from creating their own licenses.

However, this doesn’t mean that CC is for everyone. Not everyone who posts their work online is a good candidate for CC nor should they use it. Not only can it hurt your livelihood, but using it incorrectly might also damage the Creative Commons cause by letting people walk away with an unwarranted negative impression of the licenses.

This is why, before putting the CC logo on your site and announcing your new terms, it is important to take a minute and ask yourself if it is really right for you.

Having the skill to use open licensing effectively is a big part of succeeding. Different licenses have different impacts. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and what the market wants, your choice of license can sink your project or help it take off.

I’m happy to release a piece of work that I like a lot — the Wax MP3 player for the Magnatune catalog.

The Wax MP3 player is a common codebase for semi-customized music players. The first one of these projects was Fresh Hot Radio, a curated set of links to net-born electronic music under a libre or feels-free license. That came out back in March.

The new project presents the Magnatune label‘s existing catalog in a new way. Compare and contrast these two presentations of the same baroque music catalog on Magnatune.com.

The Magnatune baroque page:

The Wax MP3 page for Magnatune’s baroque music:

What’s it all about? Think of it as Ubuntu for Creative Commons music. In the same way that Ubuntu delivers user friendliness for Linux desktops, the Wax MP3 player is able to do a sleek and simple listening experience with netmusic.

I hope you dig it. If not, and if you see any bugs, send an email to email@waxmp3.com.

Magnatune founder John Buckman has a blog entry about this new Waxna Mag MP3 Tune experience. Check it out.

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It’s great to work with such an enlightened music business as Magnatune. I know that’s the most obvious thing in the world if you know them, but even when you know it you don’t really know it until you get up close. This whole deal is really built on their openness and calm confidence.

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While I’ve been working in this project I’ve been really getting into Magnatune’s classical catalog. AFAIK there’s nobody on the open web even close to their level. Here are my favorite “stations” on the new Wax MP3 player for Magnatune:

Baroque
Chamber Music
Choral
Classical After 1800
Harpsichord Solo
Medieval

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Wax MP3 Corp. is the new company. No doubt I’ll waste buckets of electrons writing about in the long run, but for today I’ll leave it to the company home page to explain it this way: